Saturday, July 06, 2013

Our digest of, and commentary on today's Florida political news and punditry.

"Florida does the worst job in the nation . . ."

The Tampa Bay Times editors: "Florida does the worst job in the nation of ensuring poor children get dental care."

Now it's expected to do even worse. Changes to the state's Medicaid system appear likely to make it impossible for the vast majority of young enrollees to obtain preventive care, increasing the odds of toothaches and disease that can have costly lifetime consequences for children and society. Florida can do better, and Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature need to see to it.

"When Florida legislators this year broke the freeze on employee pay and offered state workers salary increases for the first time in seven years, legislative leaders made sure to give some of their own employees pay raises, too. Using criteria based on performance and promotions, the increases amounted to about three to five percent for most workers but as much as 20 percent for others." "Legislative leaders rewarded high-performing staff with salary hikes".

Florida, "a sub-tropical Deadwood"

Daniel Ruth: "It is probably safe to assume that a combination of morons, liquor, guns and strip clubs will pretty well guarantee that nothing much very good will result. And that's how it was that Fred Turner Jr. wound up dead — literally being the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time."

This is what the all-too-easy proliferation of guns in our society has wrought. There was a time, before Florida opted to turn itself into a sub-tropical Deadwood, when tiffs like what occurred at the Gold Club coo-coo-ca-choo emporium would have been resolved with some innovative expressions tossed back and forth about the participants' sexuality, parentage and suggestions to commit various acts upon themselves all wrapped up very nicely by some halfhearted and ill-aimed punches attempted.

Now whatever untoward actions took place between two sad sack bumpkins sitting in a chintzy strip club apparently rose to the level where someone felt justified to shoot a total stranger.

It is probably sadly true that any serious effort to forge consensus on gun control is a political nonstarter. But just maybe some lives could be saved if society imposed a literacy test on slack-jawed yahoos wanting to enter a hoochie-coochie club.

"Rep. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, has emerged as a leading candidate to replace Mike Olson, the long-time Pasco County tax collector who died last week. . . . Fasano's appointment as county tax collector would also likely eliminate any chance that he would challenge in a GOP primary for the state Senate in 2014. That possibility has been discussed in Tallahassee in the context of creating future alliances for the Senate presidency." "Rep. Mike Fasano emerges as candidate for Pasco tax collector".

And firefighters have the audacity to expect the pensions they were promised?

Two state firefighters were killed Monday after being overtaken by fast-moving flames and smoke while battling a blaze in rural Hamilton County that also injured two other firefighters attempting to rescue them . . . [As of June of that year, Florida's] Division of Forestry [had] battled more than 1,500 wildfires, which [had] burned nearly 200,000 acres across the state. Officials said firefighters have been facing an average of more than 31 new wildfires each day.

"The governor tried to kill it. Lawmakers wouldn't fund it. Few used it."

And now, less than two years since its birth, Florida's Prescription Drug Monitoring Program is the subject of new criticism, legal action and calls that it be overhauled — or abolished.

On Monday, the Florida Department of Health will hold a workshop in Tallahassee to discuss further limiting access to records of who writes and fills prescriptions for the most addictive drugs.

The meeting comes in response to allegations last month that medical data for 3,300 Floridians had been "leaked." The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida demanded a federal investigation, and critics pointed to the incident as evidence that the system was fundamentally flawed and had allowed an inevitable breach of privacy.

Congress should intervene to keep Georgia and the Army Corps of Engineers from further damaging the seafood harvest and environmental habitat in Florida's Apalachicola Bay. The federal courts have sent a clear message they don't intend to bring fairness, clarity or a sense of urgency to ending the 23-year water wars among Florida, Georgia and Alabama. It's time that Congress established once and for all that the states must share a watershed that serves a distinct need for all three. And Washington needs to act before Apalachicola's oyster beds and estuary dry to the point of becoming both an ecological and an economic crisis.

FLA Politics - Publishing Since 2002

Florida's "netroots" and professional "media blogs" are digested immediately below. The main column includes summaries of hand picked articles, punditry and editorials about Florida politics. The far right column incorporates both permanent links and specialized news digests which are customized as necessary (now featuring "Jeb/Rubio Watch")